


And All These Colours Blind Us

by Poetiicdissonance



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Developing Friendships, Developing Relationship, Dreamwalking, Fluff, Gen, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Monthly KuZu Mini-Prompts, or at least as close to fluff as you can expect from me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-27
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:48:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27732544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poetiicdissonance/pseuds/Poetiicdissonance
Summary: In Kuei’s dreams, there is an ocean that doesn’t exist, and colours that have never existed anywhere but in his mind.
Relationships: Kuei & Yue (Avatar), Kuei/Zuko (Avatar)
Kudos: 31
Collections: Monthly KuZu Mini-Prompts





	And All These Colours Blind Us

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FantasyDeath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FantasyDeath/gifts).



> Guess who just had to make a new tag? Me! Kuei and Yue’s friendship deserves all the love. I am attached to them now. 
> 
> But also! To the ever wonderful FantasyDeath, the driving force of this ship as of yet, and who without, this fic would not exist. Here’s to you! If you liked this fic, please go check out their work, it’s what got me into this ship to start with.
> 
> Also, a head-nod to the absolutely mental playlist that this fic refused to write to anything but of 90’s hard rock, with a few appearances by The Hoosiers “A Sadness Runs Through Him” for a bit of pop/indie rock.

I.

Kuei dreams of an ocean he has never seen. The walls of Ba Sing Se are far removed from these midnight shoals. He’s dreamt of it as long as he can remember— he looks up and the sky is full of tiny pinpricks of light, whole constellations that he has no names for. He blinks, and sometimes he swears he can see colours that don’t exist anywhere else.

There is quiet and peace at the shore of the endless ocean that he can’t recall from anywhere else but his dreams. Everything is dark and shadowed but the sky is full of lights and places where the black blends into purples and reds. (In his dreams, he sees his life with clarity he doesn’t in his waking hours). He leans back into the sand, and watches until he wakes.

Kuei is asleep when the moon goes red, and the world inside his dream follows suit. The gently lapping sea turns mirror-still until he’s doused in a cresting wave that’s larger than any walls he’s ever seen. It appears out of the mirror-still water, and Kuei watches as it hits the shore and turns his world upside down.

He wakes in the library, head pillowed on his arms, and the red moon streaming in through the windows. He blinks, the world is  _ wrong _ but he doesn’t know  _ why _ . At least, not beyond the fact that the shadows move in strange ways, and that light isn’t supposed to be like  _ this _ .

He goes to the garden, and sits on a bench that’s older than he is, and stares up at the blood red moon. He prays— Tui is not his spirit, but then again, he doesn’t know what he believes in anymore. (There are whispers that the Avatar has returned, because not even Long Feng can hide that from him). He prays until the moon turns back, and the world is turned to rights. Between one breath and the next, the wrongness is fixed into the same silver-white that it has always been.

He doesn’t sleep for the rest of the night, mind too caught up in the strange events. The next morning, Long Feng has not seen what happened, nor have most of the servants he mentions it to. They were asleep in their beds, in a palace far from the sea.

II.

When Kuei dreams, he dreams of a landscape at the edge of the ocean that he has never seen before. He blinks, and the ocean starts to glow in some ephemeral, ethereal white that casts shadows on the shoreline, and then there is a figure appearing in the light. A silhouette solidifying into a woman with flowing white hair, and a dress all in the same shades. When the ocean settles back down to gently lapping waves, she is still there, and she glows in the same way that the moon does at night. 

She looks up at Kuei, her gaze settling on his form in the sand at the edge of the endless ocean, and she blinks, expression pulling into one of confusion. 

There are many things you could say in a moment like this, and more still that you can only say in silence. For a minute they just stare at each other, neither of them daring to break the silence in the nighttime landscape. She is still standing in the water, the waves swaying around her ankles.

Her hair is white, and Kuei finds his eyes drawn to the strangeness in that. It is pure, with no strands of grey or black in it. He’s heard stories about people touched by the spirits, and the way that they are never left unchanged by the experience; has heard about the way that they don’t quite feel permanent in the world, like they could vanish if the time was right, but this was different. This was a woman in his dreams, and he was not so blessed as to be touched by spirits. 

“Hello.” she says, with a smile, and a raise of her hand in what could be a wave. 

Kuei blinks once more, and returns the wave, “Hello.”

Neither of them seem to know what else to do, but she steps out of the shallows, and he stands up. 

“I am Princess Yue of the…” she trails off, and looks upwards towards the moon, and then over her shoulder to the ocean that never ends. “I was the princess of the Northern Water Tribe.”

“Was?” 

She smiles at him, but there’s a certain amount of longing in the expression that Kuei can’t read. “I’m the moon spirit now.”

His instinct says that it isn’t possible, that people can’t take the places of the spirits who have existed beyond the realms of mortals for longer than any people have been there. But he can’t find it in him to disregard the suggestion, she appeared here, in her lunar glow, and she is  _ still _ glowing, though faded now compared to the ocean she emerged from. 

“Princess Yue, a pleasure.” He says instead, with a short bow. “I am Earth King Kuei, 52nd of the crown.” Though that… he has not been the king in more than name for a very long time. 

“A pleasure exchanged.”

III.

Kuei dreams in the same way that he has always dreamt- of a shore, endless and quiet, with an innumerable number of stars above him. Except that now, there is a girl with him. The moon spirit, the princess of the Northern Water Tribe… his friend. 

They talk. He tells her about the Earth Kingdom, it’s history. Sometimes, he talks about his life. She tells him about the Northern Water Tribe, and about a boy named Sokka, and of a war that’s been kept from him. 

It is easy sometimes, to forget that she is a spirit when they are laughing together in the shallows, flicking water at each other. But she  _ is  _ a spirit _ ;  _ the sort of one that people pray to, and that has powers beyond what Kuei could ever know. But then she looks at him when they’re both collapsed in the shallows, her hair haloed out around her, and she looks like anyone else would, and it doesn’t matter what she is.

The water is never cold, and he thinks that it’s a novel experience for both of them. The water yes, but there’s more to it than that. There’s the ability to enjoy the companionship and the experience of playing in the water that neither of them had ever had before. Collapsed on the surf, damp and laughing and joyous, there is nothing regal about either of them, and there doesn’t have to be.

She is braiding his hair the first time he asks why she’s appeared to him in this place night after night. She doesn’t know, doesn’t know anything more than he does. Her best guess is that there’s something about him that brings him here to the domain of the spirit, and not that she’s been brought somewhere. Wonders if it’s because Tui and La chose mortal forms that they didn’t exist here with him before. They don’t reach any answers that night, and the palace library in his waking hours doesn’t have any better answers.

Even without answers, it doesn’t stop them spending their nights on the edge of an ocean that goes as far as the eye can see.

IV.

In Kuei’s dreams, he swears he can see colours that don’t exist, but he’s never seen them when he’s awake until Zuko. Zuko who firebends beside the Avatar with the sort of ease and comfort that Kuei can’t imagine feeling with another person (except perhaps, the moon spirit, part of him thinks). 

The colours that don’t exist in the waking world are in their fire, and it’s almost dizzying to see it. 

The peace talks have begun, but still, there are tensions that remain even aside from the Fire Nation. (The Northern Water Tribe closed itself off from the South when they needed the support, and the century of isolation couldn’t be fixed overnight). 

He thinks Yue might be crying when he tells her about Sokka and her people. 

Kuei tells her about the new Fire Lord, and the way he’s stunning, and ignores the knowing way she looks at him. He’s gotten very good at ignoring things, like Long Feng’s betrayal and how even knowing about it doesn’t make the sting any less. 

He and Zuko are both so young he realizes sometimes, when the other world leaders are talking and he is trying to understand a century of bloodshed that he didn’t know about until Yue, and when he can see the frustrated pinch in Zuko’s expression when the words and education that the Fire Lord should have are missing. 

There is something strangely comforting in knowing that he is not alone in this new world. 

He watches Zuko firebend in the courtyards after hours-long meetings where they achieve nothing but the knowledge that too much has happened in the past century to ever go back to the way things were before the war. 

The Avatar joins Zuko some days, and he is good, certainly better than Kuei could have ever expected, but there is  _ something _ that is lost with him that isn’t with Zuko. Experience maybe, but there’s something innate he has come to realize about benders and their natural elements. He doesn’t know if Zuko notices him watching, part of him thinks he must, and another part of him thinks that he must not. 

V.

The peace talks finish in a way that makes nobody happy. There are many things that they haven’t talked about, and questions that they  _ have _ , but haven’t actually come to any conclusions about. The Northern Water Tribe wants reparations that the other nations feel are undeserved. The colonies exist at all, and those are something that Kuei knows will have to be dealt with sooner rather than later. The Fire Nation doesn’t have enough land or food to feed their people through the winter after a hundred years of using the Earth Kingdoms resources, and it’s too late in the year to fix that. 

Kuei has never realized how many things had to be addressed in the wake of devastation before.

He leaves. Back to his kingdom and Ba Sing Se. There are many thing he has to do: the dismantling of the Dai Li and Lake Laogai, he needs to find advisors, there are letters that must be written to King Bumi and the other rulers of their little fiefdoms, and others that have to be sent back to Zuko. 

Those letters at least, are civil. He and Zuko get along, even if their views differ in some respects, and their experiences set them apart. The new Fire Lord is smart, insightful in a way that Kuei thinks most people won’t notice. He begins to look forward to those letters because after months of frequent correspondence, and the promise of decades more, they start to talk about things other than trade deals. There are stories and fables that Zuko knows from years of hunting the Avatar that Kuei has never read, and history of the world that Zuko finds fascinating and useful that he doesn’t have time to research on his own.

Kuei ignores the lightness in his chest when the letters arrive. That would mean that there was more to their relationship than just simple correspondence between rulers, even if sometimes they diverge into tangents about literature. Ignores too, the way he always makes time to respond to the letters, even when there are piles he has to get to, and people waiting for an audience. People that have been waiting for a very long time because Long Feng kept  _ promising _ .

VI.

It has been a year since the end of the war. This, Kuei thinks, is impressive. He is in Caldera for the second time, and there are celebrations and fireworks. They are beautiful, but not as transfixing as the wisps of colour in Zuko’s fire as he is dragged around the courtyard by his friends, and a group of children that have gathered. 

Kuei is standing near the edge of the courtyard. He has spoken already, as he should, and so have all of the other people that had to. The speech turned out well, though only after hours of revising it with his advisors, and dreams practicing it in front of Yue. (Yue, who also helped him rebuild his country, and talked him down from nights when he got too far inside his own head). 

He’s distracted when Zuko approaches, and offers a hand. “Earth King Kuei, do me the honour of a dance?” 

Kuei blinks, meeting Zuko’s eyes. “Are you quite certain you wouldn’t rather dance with the Lady Mai?” 

Zuko smiles, and it’s… Kuei knows that there is something in that expression that he doesn’t understand. (He thinks Yue might, but then again, she is far better with people than he is. She’s ore aware than he is of himself most days he rather thinks). “The Lady Mai and I are friends, but she’s not the person I want to dance with.”

“I’m a terrible dance partner,” Kuei says instead of refusing like he means to. He wants to dance with Zuko, but there are expectations. In the back of his head, there’s a voice of the moon spirit telling him to do what he wants, and he thinks about the way she still talks about Sokka, and perhaps… perhaps he could do this one thing.

“I doubt I’m any better.”

“Then perhaps we could learn together.” Kuei says and accepts the hand, following the Fire Lord to the makeshift dance section of the pavilion.

VII.

Kuei dreams of an ocean he has never seen. The walls of Ba Sing Se are far removed from these midnight shoals. So is Caldera, but that at least, is closer. In his dreams, there are colours that don't exist except when he turns his head, or blinks; in the waking world, they dance in Zuko’s flames. (“Taught by the dragons,” Zuko had murmured into his collar once). 

He is staring up at the stars, countless and shining, sometimes, they seem to waver in bursts of colour, and the galaxy shifts and the sky is alright with blues and reds of somewhere else. Yue is resting beside him talking about everything and nothing. She pauses in the middle of a sentence, and Kuei turns his head to look at her. After a beat, she continues. “I used to think we could have been alone in the universe.”

Kuei waits for more, but the seconds stretch on: one, two, three. “What changed?”

“I dreamt of an ocean that doesn't exist.” She grins, and reaches out a hand towards his, and tangles their fingers together loosely. “In a world where a girl that becomes the moon spirit can befriend the earth king, I’d be a fool to think that there can’t be life somewhere else.”

Kuei smiles at her. He supposes she’s right: she’s brilliant in a way that he has never been, and doubts ever will be. 

He has her to thank for the bravery to accept Zuko’s offer of a dance, and then later, when it was more than that. And for the faith he thought lost forever now restored.

“Thank you.” He says, looking back up at the sky, but not letting go of her hand. 

“What for?”

“For being the best part of a lifetime of dreams.” 


End file.
